Christian Parenting: Developmentally Appropriate or Developmentally Abusive?

The answer depends on whether you believe babies are intrinsically evil or not.

Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians teach that babies are inherently evil and sinful. This ideology requires a parent to reject their child’s inherent goodness and treat them with shame, fear and force. The child’s will must be broken – for their own good.

How else would you justify having a power struggle with a baby? Or hitting a small child? In this twisted world, a crying child is manipulative and must be in its place through force or neglect.

But babies can’t logic or reason. They can’t regulate their emotions, either. Those abilities do not come pre-installed. They cry because they’re overwhelmed, not rebellious. Babies do not even begin developing the capacity for guilt until age three. However, shame is internalized as early as 15 months.

They aren’t misbehaving, they are developing. When you punish a child for exhibiting developmentally appropriate behaviors, you are punishing them for existing.

Babies cannot regulate their own emotions. They are fully dependent on their caregiver’s ability to attune to their emotional needs and co-regulate them. Parenting techniques that advise spanking or neglecting a babies needs to “teach them a lesson” fractures the child’s capacity for secure attachment. These parenting techniques do not create loved, confident children who grow into mature adults. Instead, they are designed to brainwash minds, control behavior and crush spirits¹.

Stages of Development²:

Ages 0-2: No self-regulation. Infants rely entirely on caregivers to soothe and co-regulate their nervous systems. The foundation for future regulation is built through secure attachment and consistent caregiver response. Emotional wiring is the dominant activity. Not cognitive or verbal learning.

Early Childhood (2–5): Begin learning emotion words and naming emotions with help of adult modeling, verbal coaching, and setting consistent limits.

Middle Childhood (6–10): Starts to internalize strategies. Still needs support.

Adolescence (11–25): Gradual maturation of self-regulation, dependent on experience and support.

Social and Emotional Learning

A child develops emotional regulation over years of connection, safety, and modeling. When caregivers engage in interactive activities such as playing, reading, feeding, bathing, changing/dressing, and holding, children develop greater capacities to be soothed, enjoyment derived from being held, and control of their attention and emotion arousal (Bridgett et al., 2011)³.

On the other hand, when caregivers react with harsh and punitive or withdrawn and disengaged behaviors, infant self-soothing and flexible control of attention and arousal are diminished (Bridgett, Burt, Edwards, & Deater-Deckard, 2015⁴).

When a babies emotional needs are not attended to, they learn that the world is an unsafe place and that they cannot count on other people. Maternal depression, substance abuse, overwhelming personal problems, or other factors may interfere with a caregiver’s ability to be consistent and nurturing for the child. Intentional or not, this inconsistency breeds lifelong insecurity into the very architecture of the brain and nervous system creating instability in relationships and emotional regulation⁵.

In addition to intentional mistreatment, vulnerable infants experience an inconsistent, neglectful or angry presence as traumatic⁶. Therefore, relational attunement – NOT discipline – between caregiver and child is the most important element of early parenting. When a child is shamed, threatened, or ignored for expressing their needs, their brain learns fear and hiding, not regulation. When a developing brain is only taught to suppress, obey, or “die to self” then the inner resources of confidence and capability never get a chance to develop at all. Instead hypervigilance, anxiety and insecurity are the baseline emotional state.

Critical, rejecting, and interfering parents tend to have children that avoid emotional intimacy.

Abusive parents tend to have children that become uncomfortable with intimacy and withdraw.

Parenting practices and culture promoted by the Christian Brainwashing Industrial Complex create these frightening and neglectful experiences on purpose and alter typical brain development, leading to lifelong pathological beliefs, maladaptive attachment styles and mental distress.

The evidence is clear. Christian parenting techniques cause developmental trauma.

Footnotes.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10314734/ ↩︎
2. Due to limited self-regulatory and communication capacities, infants require caregiver support to stabilize their emotions, physiology, and behavior when they are expressing negative affect, physiological arousal, or unmet needs (Beeghly & Tronick, 2011). Caregivers meet their infants’ needs by providing supportive, sensitive caregiving, which involves an accurate perception of the infant’s signals and prompt and appropriate responses. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10314734/
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3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10314734/#R20 ↩︎
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10314734/#R19 ↩︎
5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6497769/#ref165 ↩︎
6. Buhler-Wassmann AC, Hibel LC. Studying caregiver-infant co-regulation in dynamic, diverse cultural contexts: A call to action. Infant Behav Dev. 2021 Aug;64:101586. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101586. Epub 2021 Jun 9. PMID: 34118652; PMCID: PMC10314734. ↩︎